The Time, it Flies!

I spent an hour Saturday morning grading notebooks and then another hour before work on Monday. Sunday I spent about half an hour finalizing the lunch detention list for Monday.
Weekend: 2.5 hours
Monday: 7:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. = 9.5 hours
Tuesday: 7:00 a.m. - 4:45 p.m. = 9.25 hours
Total hours: 198.75 (150 contract hours)
Total days: 20
Average hours per day: 9 hrs 56 min
Today we have our short school day and 2 hours of "professional development" after school. Then a parent meeting which hopefully won't take long, and we're leaving straight from there. I'm slowly getting some papers graded. I think it's finally safe to re-do the seating charts and have them last for a while... the schedule changes are done, I hope. I have the kids taking a test on Friday. I will have to try again to grade notebooks now that I led the classes through the process of writing their first and last names, the period, and the words "math notebook" in permanent marker on the outside of their notebooks. It's pure babysitting sometimes. Two of my classes are being sufficiently naughty that they don't get to work in partners. They just have to sit and listen to me lecture, take some notes and then try to struggle their way through the problems, since they won't let me teach. I will have to keep doing that until I see some sign of maturity from the boys and cooperation from the girls. It makes teaching easier but man, is it bad for their learning. Hopefully it won't last long.

Friday Night and I'm Blogging

I have 139.75 hours as of Monday. On Tuesday I worked 7:00 - 5:30 = 10 hours and Wednesday 7:30 - 5:30 = 9.5 hours. Yesterday (Thursday) I worked 7:00 - 4:00 = 8.5 hours, and today 7:00 - 4:45 = 9.25 hrs. I had to push it to get out by then because my carpool buddy would have stayed longer. We packed up our things and left, knowing we would finish on the weekend. I am grading notebooks, despite the upcoming schedule changes, because I need to give the kids some feedback. I guess I will have to spend time re-entering grades for the ones whose schedules change, but it's been 3 weeks and they need a grade on something!! Anything!! I am planning a test for Friday, so between the notebook grade and the test grade I think I will be putting out a pretty accurate progress report, which is due at the end of next week. I'm not sure how the other teachers are dealing with grades because nobody I have talked to has yet to enter any. It's a mess.
Total hours: 177.5
Total days: 18
Hours per day: 9 hrs 51 min

Working Dumb

I'm not working smart. I can't say I am entirely to blame, but if I was doing more thinking ahead, my life would have been easier the past few weeks. The principal at my school is very disorganized and makes decisions on the fly, which leads to a lot of chaos. However, I know this about her, so usually when she sends down a mandate I ignore it until I'm sure someone is following up on it. The problem has been with grading. I had set up my gradebook and was trying to enter enough grades so that the kids would have an idea about how they are doing. Feedback is really important for the kids because they get a feeling for how much effort they need to put in. I had entered a test and 2 assignments. Almost all of my students failed the test. Most of them did well on the assignment. Then, schedules started changing. The principal is trying so hard to balance the classes and make every class less than 30. This is a first for me and I support her 100%. But when she said she was going to do that, I ignored it as so much bullshit. I entered grades, and invested time in the seating charts. Incredibly enough, it is actually happening. It's absolute chaos. I never know who is going to be on my roster. Taking attendance every day is such an adventure, and the time I have invested in grading and seating charts is lost forever! I threw all the papers away and gave up on the grading. (The grades don't follow the kids when they change classes, so it's an exercise in futility to try.)
Instead of spending time on that, I have been cleaning my room, organizing materials and all the stuff that keeps popping up in my box, some of which I need and most of which I don't. My room and my desk are a lot more organized and clean. That's a good thing.
Yesterday the attendance clerk sent out an email saying the master schedule was going to change, which means teachers' schedules are changing. One of the teachers was crying in the office after school because she has to stop teaching reading because she is not qualified, so they are moving her to 8th grade science, for which she is also not qualified. (They are trying to make her quit.) Teachers are having social studies and math and reading classes added to their day just like that, and everyone is pretty upset. Teachers like me are the ones that benefit... all of my classes are below 30 now, for the first time in my 7 years of teaching.
I have my hours written down but will have to log them later. It's time to get ready for work.

I'm OK!!!

One of my 2 readers pointed out that paid vs. unpaid hours is a very negative way of looking at things, and I have to agree. I will start referring to contract hours vs. non-contract hours.
It's not that I expect a 7.5 hour workday. I think 9 hours is reasonable. I don't think that more than 9 hours combined with work on the weekends is reasonable - not for what I'm being paid, anyway.
One of the things I am after is finding out exactly how many extra hours pile up during the school year. Are they enough to make up for 2 months of vacation? If I average all the hours out at the end of the school year, how many 8- hour workdays will there be? That is one of the questions I want to answer.
All that being said, I am not unhappy or bitter. That is not why I am keeping track of my hours. I tried like crazy to find a job in the public sector this past summer. It didn't work out. I was so dreading going back, and I find that I'm quite happy to be back with my team and spending my day with kids again.
I can enjoy the good parts of teaching and distance myself from the parts that are frustrating. Part of letting go of my anger at all these extra hours is keeping track, so that at the end of the year, I can find out if my anger was justified. In the past years I have really been frustrated and angry at the end of a really long week. Putting it down on the blog and seeing it in writing helps me look at it and say, wow! That's a lot of hours! Then let it go.
Now, I have spent all morning farting around instead of working on my seating charts. Maybe I'll just pile the desks in the corner and have them sit on the floor. haha!!

Best day ever!!

Today I learned that the district won't approve another teacher for our school, and there is no way to get my class sizes down to manageable unless we put the SPED kids with the SPED teacher, in her own classroom. This is good news because I've been doing her work and my work because she has never taught middle school OR math. I'm pretty much drowning in work! So she will have to sink or swim and now I can get caught up. I should probably feel bad since she is going to be struggling and her students will not have a fair chance at success, but I can't keep doing everything for both of us.
Tuesday 8/23 7:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. = 8.5 hours, 1.5 unpaid, 30 minute meeting after school with parent about kid who isn't doing any work and is robbing the rest of the class of at least 10 instructional minutes every single day, and an hour doing seating chart and rearranging the desks.

Long day.

Yesterday (Sunday) I spent about 5 hours on grading and organizing test data so I can group the students effectively. I finished the data sorting this morning and started importing it into the seating chart software I bought. It cost $6 for the first year so I'm going to try it. Once I input all the student information, the program will take the information about the students and group them according to my specifications. I can put relationships in there, so say I have two kids who talk constantly and need to be seated apart. I can put a negative relationship between the two of them and the software will make sure that they never sit together. I can put positive relationships between kids who work well together as well. I can make sure kids get seated in the front or in the back, and I can "glue" kids to the same seat if I want them there permanently. (Comes in useful for the naughty chair.) Setting up the program is time-consuming but it's an investment because when I need to change the seating chart, for the rest of the year I can just push "place students" and get a new one, with all the rotten eggs still separated from each other.
Sunday: about 5 hours throughout the day
Monday: 7:00 - 5:30 = 10 hours, 3 unpaid grading, cleaning, doing seating software and answering emails.
Running total: 93 paid, 38.25 unpaid. 

"But what do you DO all day?"

That is a question that comes up often for a teacher. They want to know what we DO that we have to spend all this time unpaid doing things. It's an easy but long-winded question to answer. These are all the things required for the gradebook:
A minimum of 1 grade entered per week
A minimum of 3 assessments per quarter
Specific, meaningful feedback on every student's paper
Now you might think 1 grade per week, big whoop. Here's the thing: Students need to do math homework every night. Not much, just think about what they learned that day for 5 minutes or so. I give them one problem a night. Every Monday, they turn in homework with answers to five questions. These are thinking questions, which require complete sentences and showing work for their examples. About half my students turn in homework, so that is around 75 papers to grade. I would say it takes about an  hour to grade all the homework. That's 45 seconds per page.
Students need to have more than 1 paper returned each week in order for them to know how they are doing in class. So in addition to grading the homework, I need to grade classwork too. The kids keep a notebook with their bellwork and classwork, so I grade the notebooks. There are around 150 notebooks to grade, one for each student, and that is pretty quick because it is graded on completion, not accuracy. However, when there are 150 of them, that's not quick. It takes at least 20 minutes per class, so that's an hour - about 24 seconds per notebook.
We have a quiz or test about once every 10 school days. These are the biggies. They take FOREVER to grade because multiple choice is OK for about half the questions, but the others need to be performance-based answers. This means reading what they wrote, checking their work, and providing specific, meaningful feedback. It takes about 30 minutes to grade each period's quizzes, times 5, so that's 2.5 hours - 60 seconds per quiz or test.
Then, after the grading is done, the grades need to be entered into the online gradebook so that parents and students can access their grades (required). This is quick but it adds up when you have over 150 students.
All together that is an average of about 4.5 hours a week, just grading and entering grades.That's not counting having to look up the periods and last names of the kids who are too clueless to realize they are probably not the only Jose or Maria I have in my 5 class periods. (They get dinged points for that. It's so freaking frustrating they can't bother to write out their last name and by 7th grade they haven't got in the habit of doing it.)
I mentioned in my last post that we have 1.5 hours per day to do things not related to actual teaching. That's 7.5 hours all together per week. Four of them are gone - just grading.
One day per week we are required to spend 50 minutes with our content area, planning. There goes that.
We are required to make 5 positive parent contacts per week. I do postcards because if I try to make phone calls, parents want to talk and talk. Every day, there are probably 2 students who display behavior sufficiently stupid enough to warrant a parent phone call. (Last week a student dug a hole in the wall probably 2 inches long , an inch wide, and a half inch deep. The student was in time out for answering a math question I had asked the class by calling out "Doo doo.") Parents call in or email every now and then to find out how their kid is doing or complain about my homework/classwork policies. Those have to be attended to within 24 hours, required by the principal. I would say about 30 minutes per week is spent on parent contact, and that's a lowball estimate.
That leaves 2 hours and 10 minutes to do everything else. We have to write the daily objective on the board every day, along with the vocabulary and language objective. We have to write the bellwork every day. (Bellwork is absolutely required.) We have to make copies. We have to do 5 days worth of lesson plans, and lesson planning alone takes at least 4 hours every week because the template we are required to use is ridiculously long and detailed. We have to find resources for the lessons because the textbooks are woefully inadequate and don't meet the state standards. We have to upload our lesson plans to the school website so they can be scrutinized or duplicated by whomever wishes to do so.We have to clean our classroom counters, desks, and sinks because all the custodians have to do is clean the floor and empty the trash. We have to get the supplies out for class, be it markers, scissors, protractors, or whatnot. We have to go through the textbooks and erase or white out all the penis drawings, gang tags, and curse words.At least once a week, one of the administrators wants to have a meeting for this or that. We have team meetings with parents whose kids are acting like idiots on a regular basis. There are a thousand other things that teachers need to do. 2 hours and 10 minutes? Yeah, right.
You might be asking, "But what about during class? Can't you get any of this done while the kids are working on their own? Why, when I was a kid, the teacher sat and drank coffee and read the newspaper while we slaving away doing our work." You need to understand this: Teaching is not like that anymore. If EVER an administrator comes in and we are sitting at our desk, we hear about it. We HAVE to be monitoring the kids every single minute of every class. I would be doing that anyway because I teach all the lowest kids, academically speaking. Their level of independence is about zero. At any given time, if I try to have them work on their own, there are about 5 hands in the air. (If you keep your hand up, you have an excuse for not doing any work. "Miss, I was waiting for you to help me!") When they take a test, teachers are expected to be walking around, monitoring. I am not kidding you. If someone walks in and sees you doing anything else, you WILL hear about it. They visit at least once a day, by the way.
I could be a shitty teacher and leave some of this out. But you tell me, what have I said above that isn't required but also isn't necessary in order for me to teach effectively? 
Having unloaded that, here are the rest of the stats for this week:
Tuesday: 7 a.m. - 5 p.m. = 9.5 hours, 2.5 unpaid.
Wednesday: 6:45 a.m. - 5:15 p.m. = 10 hours, 3 hours unpaid. (2 paid hours spent in a stupid meeting with all the math teachers in the school, designing a unit for the district, which they proceeded to throw out yesterday, saying it was inadequate. We're only teachers, what the fuck do we know about what the kids need to learn?)
Thursday: 7 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. = 9 hours, 2 unpaid (15 minute meeting before school about tutoring.)
Friday: 7 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. = 9 hours, 2 unpaid (10 minute meeting before school about how they were throwing out the curriculum unit mentioned above. Great way to start the day.)
Today I need to do my lesson plans and grade homework and quizzes, so it will be about 6 hours but I will have to post on that next time.
Weekly total: 35 paid, 17.75 unpaid = 52.75 hours this week.
Running total: 84 paid, 35.25 unpaid. Keep in mind, this was the 2nd week of school. Teachers got it easy, right?

A Social Experiment

I don't know if that is the right thing to call it, but I am going to start a new project. I am going to try to turn my blog into a running tally of hours actually worked teaching this school year. I am also going to include information about what the unpaid hours were spent doing, and possibly details about why they were necessary.
A few things non-teachers need to be aware of:
1. Our contract provides for 211 paid days of work. The work day is 7 hours and 30 minutes long, including lunch, so each day there are 7 hours of actual paid work.
2. The contract day begins at 7:45 and ends at 3:30. The kids start at 8:10 and leave at 3:30. We have 50 minutes of prep time, leaving us an hour and a half each day to do work non-related to actual teaching.
3. 211 x 7 = 1477, so dividing my annual salary by that number, I make just shy of $23.70/hr. (This is assuming the bond election in November passes, and there are no furlough days added to the calendar. There may be as many as 5.)
Teachers started work on Thursday, August 5th, so that is where I will begin.

Thursday 8/4: 7:30 - 4:00 = 8 work hours, 1 unpaid traveling from school to the stupid casino and back for the annual kickoff (how did they pay for that??).
Friday 8/5: 7:00 - 4:30 = 8.5 work hours, 1.5 unpaid getting classroom ready.(Working lunch, gee thanks principal. We were excused at 2:30 so that we could come back from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. for the parent-teacher meet and greet.)
Total: 13.5 paid, 2.5 unpaid = 16

Sunday 8/7: 1:00 - 4:00 = 3 unpaid, writing syllabus and week 1 homework.
Monday 8/8: 6:30 - 4:00 = 2 unpaid getting classroom ready, as we were provided 1.5 hours to do so.
Tuesday 8/9: (first day for the kids) 6:30 - 4:00 = 2 unpaid making copies, teaching co-teacher how to do today's math, and trying desperately to finish making the classroom presentable. The custodians left yesterday at 2:00 p.m. and they had not emptied the trash or cleaned the desks, which were still dirty from the end of last school year.
Wednesday 8/10: 7:30 -5:00, 2 unpaid hanging posters (required by principal), finding supplies needed for the rest of the week, doing health forms for nurse, updating website (required by principal), teaching co-teacher tomorrow's math, making copies.
Thursday 8/11: 7:30 - 4:00: Jury duty. Practically a day off.
Friday 8/12: 7:45 - 3:45, 0.5 unpaid updating website, setting up online gradebook (the program went down halfway through and wiped out everything I had done. Gave up and went to the bar.)
Saturday 8/13: Total 8 unpaid spread out through the day. Read and logged information given by parents on syllabus signature form, added parent emails to online address book, tried to set up online gradebook and data was wiped out again when the program went down.The syllabus part takes a long time because we have about 150 students.
Week total: 49 paid, 17.5 unpaid = 66.5

Sunday 8/14: 6 hours throughout the day. Successfully set up grade book, hooray!
Monday 8/15: 7:00 - 4:45 = 9.25 hours, 2.25 unpaid grading papers and organizing signature sheets from each student's agenda (required by principal).